


An Army of Stolen Children

by Morgyn Leri (morgynleri)



Series: Their Name Is Death [3]
Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Child Soldiers, Clones, Don’t copy to another site, GFY, Gen, Mando'a, Slavery, the jedi are not your friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-18
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-10-11 21:52:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17454917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/pseuds/Morgyn%20Leri
Summary: Jango Fett wanted a child of his own blood, that he could not otherwise have. He got both more and less than he wanted.





	An Army of Stolen Children

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flamethrower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamethrower/gifts).



> Translations for the Mando'a are in the end notes. Hopefully I have not mangled things much. Thank you to flamethrower for help with the Mando'a where I was being frustrated, and also thanks for the longer version of Resol'nare that I borrowed a piece from.
> 
> This is set not long after Escape, and Obi-Wan hasn't had time to even begin to sort himself out. It informs some of his dialogue and actions.

All Jango had wanted was a child of his own blood. A child he could not have in a conventional way. Satine is the one who suggests a way it might be done, and her sister is the one who finds them the place to go to have it done quietly and well.

When he returns a year later to fetch his promised child, he finds rather more than he was expecting. A Jetii - dar'jetii, he will call him later - who is staring, fascinated, at row upon row of softly glowing tubes. Tubes that contain growing beings that are enough to begin composing an army.

"They're bought and paid for." The Jetii's voice is rough, as if from screaming, and thick with a rage that for a moment seems to spark in the air around him. "The records are that way." He gestures vaguely in the direction of the office Jango had come from. The office with a dead Kaminoan on the floor, whose skin had crackled with ice in places where it didn't fall to ash at the touch.

"Who paid for them, Jetii?" Jango has one hand wrapped tightly around his blaster, the other poised to send out a whipcord to wrap the Jetii into stillness.

The air sparks again, bright fire and flecks of ice, and Jango takes an instinctive step back, blaster up and ready to fire before he even thinks about it.

"The same people who didn't bother to pay my parents for me." There's a pause, the Jetii never looking away from the tubes. "At least I don't think they paid for me. Would it have been better that way?"

Jango isn't sure what the Jetii is saying makes any sense to anyone but him, but there's something. Perhaps, despite the robes, not as much a Jetii as all Jango has heard and seen. At a safe distance, because he's not fool enough to get this close to one, not until now. And now only because he wants the son he was promised, and cannot find.

"Did they send you to get their army for them?"

"No." The Jetii shrugs, looking away from the tubes finally, tilting his head as he studies Jango. "They don't know where I am. Are you going to tell them?"

Jango huffs, slowly lowering his blaster. "If you're trouble, I'll kill you, but I wouldn't even turn Vizla over to the Jetiise."

The Jetii lets out a soft, almost bitter laugh. "I have already died, I just refused to let go of myself enough to stay dead. Stay dead and let them mold what they wanted out of my ashes."

Ice trickles down Jango's spine, and he doesn't think the Jetii is causing it, not directly. More like the ice that trickled down his spine when he saw the Jetii standing over Jaster, and all he could do was make sure his father's body died with him.

"Now they've stolen blood, and they'll have all the minds they wish to mold into their perfect army to keep the galaxy in perfect light." The Jetii's lip curls, and his fingers tap against his hip, the viewing window in front of him vibrating in its frame. "I could free them all."

"Whose stolen blood?"

"They don't say who it is. Subject numbers. Five of them." The Jetii watches Jango from the corner of his eye. "They have younglings already. Maybe you'll know who they are."

Jango watches the Jetii for a long moment in return, before he holsters his blaster. "Show me." He doubts he'll know, but he'll look anyway. Maybe they'll have data somewhere that he can actually use.

He looks through the viewing window as the Jetii turns away, watching the tubes as they rest in racks. Whoever these were made from, they can't be turned over to the Jetiise. And to simply kill them out of hand makes him uneasy. He hopes he can find some other solution. Talk to Satine and to Bo-Katan, and perhaps adopt the entire lot of these unknown clones, even if there are enough to make the systems around Mandalore uneasy.

The Jetii leads him to another viewing window, far down the hall, which shows a vast room full of tiny children, all diligently sitting in rows with something fixed to their heads. Blond and red and dark, some with a face that he's seen only because Bo-Katan thought to tease her sister, some with one in worn flimsies rescued from flames of his own childhood. There are others he does not know, but it is enough to know those faces.

"They were asked to make a child for me. One." Jango can hear the tension in his voice. "I see many, and older than the infant I had asked for."

"You did not pay so much." The Jetii says it as if he knows Jango, knows what he had done. Perhaps he does, if he's been into Kamino's records.

"No." But he will not leave his children - nor any other of the others - behind. Even the ones who are yet in those glowing tubes. "What else did you find here?"

"Not a child newly born. They did not make what you contracted for." The Jetii is watching the children, fingers once more tapping at his hip, though here the glass does not vibrate. "Do you want them?"

"They are mine, no matter who contracted for them. They did not ask me, and I will not give up my claim to them." Jango looks at the children again. "Nor would any of the others they are made from."

A smile curls the Jetii's lips a moment. "You know them."

"One of them, yes. The rest?" Jango shrugs. He can't tell. "I'll still claim them." They are of Mandalore, now, no matter their genetic origins. He will find a way to raise them all with the Resol'nare, find them all families who will do so. He turns away from the window after a long moment. "Show me the records you found."

* * *

"They did what?" Satine's voice is even, though Jango can hear the edge to it that spoke of her anger, words not quite clipped, and the Kalevala accent of her Mando'a heavier than usual.

"Cloned you, cloned me, made an army for the Jetiise out of us and others. No names in their database for the others." Though Jango has suspicions about at least one other source of the blood used. Some of them look like they could be sisters to those who wear Satine's face.

"Do you think they asked anyone else?" As they very much did not ask either of them, nor Bo-Katan.

Jango snorts, shaking his head. "The Jetiise don't ask. They take." He pauses, glacing over to where the Jetii is pacing, eyes darting from one thing to another in some middle distance. "Too much, they take."

Satine follows his gaze even though she can't see the Jetii. "Who else is there?"

"The one who found what the Kaminoans and the Jetiise did before I did." Jango watches the Jetii a long moment more. "I don't know how much they took from him. I think he hates them more than I do."

Satine blinks. "Jetii?"

"Dar'jetii." Jango doesn't think about it, just lets the word be. Whoever the man is, however much one of them the Jetiise had tried to make him, he ran here. He is alone, and no Jetii is alone. Even the one with the arrogance to think he could unmake the Mand'alor wasn't alone.

There's a long quiet, Satine watching him through the holo-com. Studying him, and trying to decide if she believed him compromised or not. "How much of an army did they make?"

Too much of one, even the fraction he's seen. The data indicates an order for hundreds of millions more, though insufficient genetic material has been provided to complete the order.

"Enough to bring the entire galaxy under the Jetiise heel."

Satine's already pale face goes white as the walls around him, before anger blooms red into her cheeks and a brightness into her eyes. "They will not have it."

Which leaves only the question of how they're going to secure this army before the Jetiise find their wayward member, or find Jango is away from Mandalore.

* * *

The data has information about a storage facility, though no details about what it contains, other than "equipment awaiting deployment". Jango doesn't like leaving the dar'jetii alone, either here, or being sent to find out what is meant by equipment. Though finding that he'd crashed the ship he came here in into the ocean outside makes the decision for Jango. He's not letting the dar'jetii into his ship.

When he sees the rows and columns of occupied stasis tubes in the automated warehouse, he stumbles back outside, and fumbles his helmet off to heave up everything he's eaten recently. Crouching on the landing platform in the rain, breathing through the sick horror and the flaring rage.

He looks for an office when he goes back in, and finds one occupied by a Kaminoan with droid aides. Jango doesn't think hard about raising his blaster, and putting a charred hole in the Kaminoan's head, and through the central processor of each of the droids.

There is more data in the computer here, and he finds the com unit, taking the time to key it first to his ship, and then letting his ship bounce it off the stations that once provided communication across an empire. The Republic hasn't found them all, and the security is more welcome now than even it had been when he first told Satine of this horror show.

"Jango?" Satine is frowning at him, leaning forward as if she could reach out and touch him. "Din'kartay, Mand'alor."

"They used Jaster." Jango doesn't like that his voice sounds strangled, no matter how much it feels like sand has gotten into his armor. Under his skin. "They took his body, and they used Jaster for their army."

It had been bad enough that he'd had to leave Jaster's armor behind with his body, had to leave his face behind, but that the Jetiise had then made thousands of men wearing his skin, no doubt carefully as unmade as they'd tried to do to Jaster himself. He hears a grinding noise, and has to consciously unclench his jaw, trying to let the anger go. Fighting while this angry is not a good idea, and he wants very much to find someone to fight.

Satine has filled his silence with emphatic cursing, and Jango can hear someone else in the background asking what else has gone wrong. Bo-Katan, probably, or their brother. Jango listens as Satine tells them the short version, and a moment later, Bo-Katan is in the image with Satine.

She studies him for a long moment. "Gar shuk meh kyrayc, Mand'alor. Ni'olaro at gar."

Jango can only nod, and reach to turn the com off. He has to find out the extent of this facility, and what he needs to do so these unwilling children of Jaster can at least have some choice. He had thought there were only children, that this was a new plan of the Jetiise. But they had to have been planning this for years, to have this place waiting for the Jetiise to come fetch their army.

He takes a deep breath, and puts his helmet back on, shutting out the world on anything but his own terms, and starts in on the computer here, to see what their database says. This keeps getting worse the more he finds, and he needs to find it all before Bo-Katan arrives.

* * *

Jango slept on board his ship, orbiting Kamino, rather than risk being on the planet if and when they found their facilities infiltrated. Or, for that matter, risking being vulnerable around the dar'jetii, no matter that they share an enemy. It's too soon to trust him that much.

Returning to the surface is easier than he expects, almost as if the Kaminoans haven't found either his work at the one facility - even dumping the body in the ocean wouldn't remove any surveillence he didn't find, or the blood stains on the floor - or the dar'jetii and his own mess.

"Most of their population isn't even on this side of the planet." The dar'jetii shrugs when Jango says as much about them still being undetected. "I came here because I was avoiding large populations of sentients."

Jango snorts, and the dar'jetii rolls his eyes. The clones still in tubes must not register as sentients by whatever method the dar'jetii was using to detect them. He doesn't ask, doesn't want to know.

"What was at the other facility?"

The dar'jetii glances at him, curiousity lighting his eyes for a moment before he looks back through the window Jango had found him in front of this time. Watching the tiny clones at what must be lessons of some kind. Lessons that Jango needs to find a way to change, because he doubts the Jetiise would provide them anything like what he would thinks is proper education. Ba'jur. It's a daunting prospect to manage that for so many at once.

"More clones, in stasis." Jango can hear the anger in his voice, as thick and heavy as it had been last night. "Only two genetic sources. One of them was a Wookie."

The dar'jetii turns from the window, staring at him for a long moment. "How many?"

"Too many." Jango wonders what will happen if he sends that information to Kashyyyk. He thinks he'd do best to go himself, and to make sure he doesn't get too far from his ship while telling them. Even if they aren't inclined to rip the arms off the messenger, he doesn't need to get dragged into an immediate attempt to raid the Jetiise's temple. No matter how tempting.

"Have you gotten anything else from the database here?" he asks, to keep the dar'jetii from asking him something else.

He can all but feel the rage that bleeds off the dar'jetii before the answer, a short and sharp affirmative, is given. Whatever it is, the dar'jetii cannot speak of it, only brings up the information in the stolen office that is now clean of Kaminoan corpse. A schematic hangs in the air, spinning above the holoprojector, and Jango takes the long moment to read the accompanying information.

Jango walks out of the office before he can put a hole in the computer, which still has information that he cannot destroy. Walks out of the facility because he doesn't know how the tiny cloned children would react if he slaughtered their Kaminoan caretakers - if there are any - in front of them.

He spends the rest of the day cleaning his blasters, other weapons, and his armor, and doing maintenance work on his ship. Letting routine work wear at him until he thinks he can go back inside and look at the information once more. Find out how to fix one more thing the Jetiise have twisted and harmed.

Those stolen children will not be unmade by Jetiise whispering words into the air, not while he can stop it. They are his children now, and he would adopt them all if he had the time to do it properly. And if not, he'll still see them raised right. Ba'jur. Beskar'gam. Ara'nov. Aliit. Mando'a. Mand'alor.

* * *

Bo-Katan arrives at Kamino to find even more than she'd been told before leaving Kalevala and Satine. Beside her maybe two-year-old self staring back at her from far too many faces, and Satine's face younger than she can ever remember seeing outside a holo. Jaster and Jango, too, and that is staggering in its arrogance, the Jetiise thinking they can use the Mand'alor and his buir as an army of chains.

"Haar'chak!" She spits the word out as she looks over the information Jango has left up for her to see. "Hut'uunla Jetiise."

"Don't break the console, please." The quiet voice comes from a shadowed corner of the room, and Bo-Katan spins, blaster up and finger moving to the trigger before she even registers the shape of the person. Robed, like a Jetiise, and like a Jetii, her blaster bolt misses entirely. It makes the Jetii grin, and Bo-Katan bares her teeth beneath her helmet.

"Gev!" Jango's voice is sharp, and Bo-Katan responds automatically, stepping back, her blaster muzzle dropping to point at the floor. "Dar'jetii narudar."

"Tion'dar'jetii?" Bo-Katan watches the man in the corner come out into the light, studying him for a long moment. He looks rumpled and singed, but his expression makes Bo-Katan's blood run cold. How he manages to look both serene and full of rage at the same time, she doesn't know, and doesn't think she wants to know.

"Elek." Jango comes forward where Bo-Katan can see him, his attention turning to the man - Jetii, dar'jetii, Bo-Katan will reserve judgement, but he's an ally at least for now. "I would prefer you didn't do to her what you did to that Kaminoan, dar'jetii."

"She's not making slaves out of children for those who would be my masters, is she?"

Bo-Katan can feel the bitter rage of those words pressing against her like acid against her skin. She wonders if she'll find burns on her arms under her beskar'gam later. Glaring back at him, she sets her blaster deliberately aside. "Copaani mirshmure'cye?"

"Was that a challenge or an insult?" The man looks over to Jango, puzzlement crossing his face.

"Both. Neither." Jango shrugs. "I called, she answered. And a simple promise you won't kill her would be enough. Without the implied insult."

The aruetii looks down a moment, before meeting Bo-Katan's gaze through her helmet. "I apologize for my inconsiderate words."

She watches him a moment before nodding her head sharply. Apology accepted, even if he is a di'kut. "Tion gar gai?"

"Do you speak Basic, or am I going to need a translation droid?"

"Nayc. Ni'jorhaa'ir Mando'a." She pauses, grinning. "Dush tiones, aruetii."

Jango snorts. "You won't find a droid that can translate Mando'a for you, dar'jetii. And Bo-Katan asked your name."

There's a long silence, and the aruetii blinks several times, looking lost. "I. Don't remember ever having a name."

Bo-Katan stares in return, wondering how he'd gone this long without a name to be called. She doesn't even have words for this, the depth of horror that taking away this much from someone invokes. To leave behind a name, that is a choice, but to have it ripped away?

"Demagolkase," she spits out, finally, the only word she knows that comes close to what the Jetiise have become.

"That I'm sure is an insult." N'gai is frowning at her, and Bo-Katan makes a soothing gesture. "What did she just say?"

"Did you ever learn of someone named Demagol in whatever history the Jetiise teach?" Jango is holding very still, watching N'gai, and flinching slightly when he shakes his head. "A vile geneticist who experimented on children."

"Ah." There's surprise on N'gai's face, and he gives Bo-Katan a puzzled look before he shrugs. "Not an insult of me, is it?"

"Nayc." Bo-Katan takes a deep breath, reaching up to remove her helmet. Letting N'gai see her expression, and looking over at Jango. "Din'kartay."

"Information sharing, planning." Jango translates before N'gai can ask. "You've seen the database here. There's another one, where they have those they made from Jaster in stasis, and older wookie clones. There are younger ones here, separate from the rest."

He pauses, heading out of the room, and leading Bo-Katan to a window that overlooks a room full of tiny children, N'gai trailing behind them. "K’ba’jurir b’gar Mando’ade. All of them. No matter what the kaminii were told by the jetiise."

Something that will take more than a handful of them to accomplish. Bo-Katan smiles, sharp and fierce. A challenge worth whatever cost.

**Author's Note:**

> Jetii - jedi, singular
> 
> dar'jetii - literally, not a Jedi, and in this context, that is how it is being used. Can also mean Sith.
> 
> Jetiise - Jedi, plural, in this context. Can also mean Republic.
> 
> Resol'nare - Six Actions, the core tenets of being Mando'ade.
> 
> din'kartay - sit-rep
> 
> Mand'alor - sole leader. the leader of the Mandalorians.
> 
> Gar shuk meh kyrayc, Mand'alor. - You're no use dead, Mand'alor. Functionally telling Jango to go get some sleep.
> 
> Ni'olaro at gar. - I come to you.
> 
> Ba'jur - education.
> 
> Ba'jur. Beskar'gam. Ara'nov. Aliit. Mando'a. Mand'alor. - Education. Armor. Self-defense. Family/tribe. Mando'a. Mand'alor. The shortened version of the Resol'nare, and what children are taught first of the Resol'nare.
> 
> buir - parent/caretaker
> 
> haar'chak - damn it.
> 
> Hut'uunla Jetiise. - cowardly Jedi.
> 
> Gev! Dar'jetii narudar. - Stop! The not-a-Jedi is a temporary ally (enemy of our enemy).
> 
> Tion'dar'jetii? - He's not a Jedi?
> 
> Elek. - yes.
> 
> Copaani mirshmure'cye? - Are you looking for a smack in the face?
> 
> aruetii - in this context, stranger or outsider.
> 
> Tion gar gai? - What's your name?
> 
> Nayc. Ni'jorhaar'ir Mando'a. Dush tiones, aruetii. - No. I speak Mando'a. Bad question, outsider.
> 
> Demagolkase - people who commit atrocities.
> 
> N'gai - no-name
> 
> K'ba'jurir b'gar Mando'ade. - Raise your children as Mandalore. Part of the Resol'nare, often abbreviated to just Ba'jur.
> 
> kaminii - Kaminoans


End file.
